Family fears 95-year-old grandmother died in Los Angeles fire: 'We just want to know'

As brush fires continue to spread across Los Angeles County, two granddaughters told ABC News' Los Angeles station that they fear that their 95-year-old grandmother, Dalyce Curry, was killed in the Eaton Fire.

Dalyce Kelley and Loree Beamer-Wilkinson said they were still waiting on official confirmation as of Sunday.

The Eaton Fire has ravaged over 14,000 acres in Altadena, California, with 27% containment.

The Southern California fires have killed at least 24 people since their outbreak on Jan. 7, according to Los Angeles County fire officials, who have also said the numbers are expected to increase.

Kelley told KABC that she last saw her grandmother last Tuesday, which was the day that the fire broke out.

They had been at a medical center earlier in the day, and Kelley drove her grandmother home after she was discharged. Driving home, they saw the fire in the mountains -- but it seemed far away, Kelley said.

Once they arrived at Curry's address, close to midnight, Kelley noted that the power was still on and there was no sense of imminent danger.

Kelley said that her grandmother had asked her to stay over because they were both so exhausted from the long day at the hospital.

But Kelley said that she has another sibling who is dealing with cancer. Someone had been with the sibling throughout the day but needed to go home, Kelley said, meaning that she had to drive back and relieve them.

She's a primary care provider to both that sibling and her grandmother, she said, which means "if she was still alive, I would have been called by now."

Kelley checked the Pasadena Civic Center for her with no luck.

The family is hoping for a miracle, "but honestly we don't feel very hopeful that she's still here with us," Kelley said.

The family received a message about the power going out in Altadena around 2 a.m. -- a few hours after Curry had been brought home.

Altadena has eclectic little homes, Kelley explained, adding that the neighbors all knew each other. She said that it seemed like someone would get her grandmother out of there, "if I was absent and if there was an evacuation order that came into play."

But when she woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, she saw that someone had texted the neighborhood chain asking if anybody got Didi -- a nickname for her grandmother.

At that point, Kelley said that she "panicked" and called 911. She headed back to her grandmother's address.

As she approached Altadena, "It was so black, daytime turned into night," she said.

There was a barricade, but she jumped out of her vehicle and grabbed an officer to say that her elderly grandmother was at home by herself.

The officer suggested going to civic center to see if she had been evacuated to that location, explaining that he would check the address in the meantime.

However, Curry was not at the evacuation spot. The officer then called Kelley and said "I'm sorry your grandmother's property is gone -- it totally burned down," she recalled in her interview with KABC.

She was told to file a missing persons police report.

A member of the national guard was able to escort Kelley to her grandmother's address on Friday, she said. When she arrived, "it was total devastation," she said, adding: "Everything was gone except her blue Cadillac."

Beamer-Wilkinson, Kelley's sister who lives in Colorado, tried to help from afar by calling the medical examiner's office. But she wasn't able to get any concrete answers.

They said they hadn't been out to that area yet, but it was on their list and they had her name, Beamer-Wilkinson said.

That was all the two granddaughters had been able to do so far.

"We are just kind of in a wait-and-hold pattern right now," Beamer-Wilkinson added. "It's very hard to be waiting and not know anything."

ABC News reached out to the medical examiner for comment.

"Our souls are aching, our hearts are broken," Kelley told KABC. "She loved Altadena. There is no one who loved that city more than my grandmother."

"She just loved life, and at 95 she was still very active," Beamer-Wilkinson added. "She looked beautiful – she took really good care of herself, she took great pride in who she was and who she represented -- and she was an amazing grandmother."

"She said she had yet began to live, so I knew she would just be here beyond 100," Kelley said. "She still wanted to date, she wanted to find a husband."

"I felt so privileged to know this woman and to have her as my grandmother," Beamer-Wilkinson said.

The sisters explained that they couldn't think of any reason that Curry wouldn't have reached out to them by now if she had survived.

"You just wouldn't think that a fire is going to destroy everything," Beamer-Wilkinson said.

"They have to do better with the emergency system because there's a that was a very elderly kind of community," Kelley said. "There's a lot of retirees there, and we can't just rely on the cellphone, because elderly people don't really do cellphones. They don't. That's not the only way we should notify people when there's evacuation orders."

"And why did it not happen earlier?" she continued. "Why was I allowed to be to have access to her home at midnight and not have any danger warnings? No highway signs up the way saying, 'This is evacuation zone.'"

"When we talk about the elderly, I think we tend to, as a society, dismiss them and think, 'Well, they live their life.' And yes, she was 95, but she had a lot more to give," Beamer-Wilkinson said. "It's a shame that no one saved her."

"And I mean, again, maybe we're talking out of turn. Maybe she's going to turn up, right? We're pulled by that 1% I hope," she said, adding that they were not confident that they would see their grandmother again, but: "We just want to know, right?"